Mick Hartley

Another side of the WPATH files, as mentioned by Janice Turner in today's Times:

If you thought eunuchs died out with the Ottoman Empire and have become merely Machiavellian characters in Game of Thrones, you’ve lost track of modern sexual mores. A release this week of leaked documents and internal videos from WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health) was appallingly familiar to anyone acquainted with the grotesque “treatments” that rapacious doctors, especially in the US, perform on vulnerable adults and children.

One issue, however, highlighted by the feminist online magazine Reduxx, was somewhat eye-popping. WPATH is a symposium of global “experts” who draw up “best practice” guidance for treating trans people. Yet in 2021 it updated its standards of care to define eunuch as a gender identity and suggested it might be one that required surgeons to perform “reduction or elimination of masculine physical features”.

WPATH was effectively saying that a medic might be correct to castrate a physiologically disturbed man. (One would-be patient was a 19-year-old autistic youth who lived in his parents’ basement and saw surgery as a route back to childhood.)

Reduxx discovered that an academic who contributed to WPATH’s eunuch guidance was, under a pseudonym, an administrator on a website called The Eunuch Archive, a sadomasochistic forum brimming with paedophilic torture fantasies in which little boys are grateful to the men who castrate them. WPATH is no marginal institution: its protocols were adopted by Tavistock’s Gids clinic, and its name is still invoked across the NHS.

One of the very few – the only? – mention of the WPATH files scandal in the mainsteam press.